US Project Thor Would Fire Tungsten Poles at Targets from Outer Space

As the threat of space-based weapons - and treaties to limit them - occupies an increasingly large part of defense spending and international competition, nations have sought loopholes in existing treaties to get a leg up on their opponents, including placing kinetic energy weapons in orbit.

The US Air Force's "Project Thor" revives a dream weapons manufacturers have had since the dawn of nuclear weapons: how to create damage equivalent to a nuclear bomb without the trouble of nuclear radiation and fallout. Kinetic bombardment, once prohibitively expensive, is now back on the agenda, since it involves no explosives and is not technically barred from being put into orbit by the Outer Space Treaty.

It's easy to see why the New York Times called them "tungsten thunderbolts." A more common nickname for the weapon is simply "rods from God." The power of the impact would be similar to the explosive yield of a ground-penetrating nuclear weapon, We Are the Mighty reported Monday. Unlike nukes, the rods from God generate zero fallout.

WAtM estimated the cost of lifting objects into space at $10,000 per pound, meaning that 200 cubic feet of tungsten rod, which weighs around 24,000 pounds, would cost about $230 million per rod to place into orbit. Compared to Breaking Defense's estimated cost of $212.5 million a piece for the Air Force's proposed next generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, the difference seems almost negligible, especially when the danger of radioactive fallout is removed from the equation.

The Pentagon revived the idea in the early 2000s, weighing the option of using them to strike underground nuclear sites in rogue nations. In 2002, a RAND report titled "Space Weapons, Earth Wars," dedicates no small amount of space to the concept and the Air Force's 2003 "Transformation Flight Plan," references "hypervelocity rod bundles" in its outline of future space-based weapons, the San Francisco Chronicle notes.

The Pentagon continued to research kinetic energy weapons, such as the railgun the Office of Naval Research claimed in 2012 can throw a 25-pound "hypervelocity projectile" with 32 megajoules of energy, penetrating seven steel plates and destroying whatever sits on the other side. "One megajoule of energy," the office notes, "is equivalent to a 1-ton car traveling at 100 miles per hour."

"The violence comes from the chemical explosive inside that bomb sending off a blast wave, followed by the fragments of the bomb case. But the difference with kinetic energy projectiles is that the warhead arrives at the target moving very, very fast — the energy is there to propel those fragments without the use of a chemical explosive to accelerate them. The more mass, the more violence," Weingart said.

While other countries, including Russia and China, have been pressuring the US to sign "an international, legally binding instrument on the prevention of an arms race in outer space," as a draft resolution put before the UN in October 2017 called it, Washington has been adamant in its rejection of such treaties. That disregard for international disarmament showed up once again in Trump's threats to scrap the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a 1987 document limiting nuclear weapons with very short warning times.

More recently, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have made overtures to renew talks on the INF treaty as well as a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which aims at general arms reduction, and to begin to take seriously the threat of space-based weapons.

"We are very concerned about the danger of the transformation of outer space into a sphere of armed confrontation. This subject has become more and more worrisome recently," Lavrov said at a news conference on November 2.

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